Death of a Revolutionary: Che Guevara's Last Mission


Richard L. Harris - 1970
    Harris offers a balanced look at the man behind the legend and the circumstances that created him and shaped his choices.

$2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America


Kathryn J. Edin - 2015
    Modonna Harris and her teenage daughter Brianna in Chicago often have no food but spoiled milk on weekends. After two decades of brilliant research on American poverty, Kathryn Edin noticed something she hadn’t seen since the mid-1990s — households surviving on virtually no income. Edin teamed with Luke Shaefer, an expert on calculating incomes of the poor, to discover that the number of American families living on $2.00 per person, per day, has skyrocketed to 1.5 million American households, including about 3 million children. Where do these families live? How did they get so desperately poor? Edin has procured rich — and truthful — interviews. Through the book’s many compelling profiles, moving and startling answers emerge. The authors illuminate a troubling trend: a low-wage labor market that increasingly fails to deliver a living wage, and a growing but hidden landscape of survival strategies among America’s extreme poor. More than a powerful exposé, $2.00 a Day delivers new evidence and new ideas to our national debate on income inequality.

Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn


Karen McCarthy Brown - 1991
    She explores the importance of women's religious practices along with related themes of family and of social change. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of traditional ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Startlingly original, Brown's work endures as an important experiment in ethnography as a social art form rooted in human relationships. A new preface, epilogue, bibliography, and a collection of family photographs tell the story of the effect of the book's publication on Mama Lola's life.

The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory


Linda J. Nicholson - 1997
    Organized historically, these essays provide a sense of the major turning points in feminist theory.Contributors include: Norma Alarcon, Linda Alcoff, Michele Barrett, Elsa Barkley Brown, Judith Butler, Nancy Chodorow, Patricia Hill Collins, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Nancy Fraser, Carol Gilligan, Heidi Hartmann, Nancy C. M. Hartsock, Luce Irigaray, Catharine MacKinnon, Uma Narayan, Linda Nicholson, Ellen Rooney, Gayle Rubin, Gayatri Spivak, Wendy W. Williams and Monique Wittig.

The Return of Martin Guerre


Natalie Zemon Davis - 1983
    This book, by the noted historian who served as a consultant for the film, adds new dimensions to this famous legend.

Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age


Marcus Rediker - 2004
    The real lives of this motley crew-which included cross-dressing women, people of color, and the'outcasts of all nations'-are far more compelling than contemporary myth.

The Power Elite


C. Wright Mills - 1956
    C. Wright Mills examines and critiques the organization of power in the United States, calling attention to three firmly interlocked prongs of power: the military, corporate, andpolitical elite. The Power Elite can be read as a good account of what was taking place in America at the time it was written, but its underlying question of whether America is as democratic in practice as it is in theory continues to matter very much today.What The Power Elite informed readers of in 1956 was how much the organization of power in America had changed during their lifetimes, and Alan Wolfe's astute afterword to this new edition brings us up to date, illustrating how much more has changed since then. Wolfe sorts out what is helpful inMills' book and which of his predictions have not come to bear, laying out the radical changes in American capitalism, from intense global competition and the collapse of communism to rapid technological transformations and ever changing consumer tastes. The Power Elite has stimulated generations ofreaders to think about the kind of society they have and the kind of society they might want, and deserves to be read by every new generation.

Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System


Alexander Betts - 2017
    This valuable book represents the kind of can-do thinking that we need to see' David Miliband An eye-opening account of the migrant crisis which shows why our global refugee regime is broken and how it can be fixed Europe is facing its greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, yet the institutions responding to it remain virtually unchanged from those created in the post-war era. As neighbouring countries continue to bear the brunt of the Syrian catastrophe, European governments have enacted a series of ill-considered gestures, from shutting their borders to welcoming refugees without a plan for their safe passage or integration upon arrival. With a deepening crisis and a xenophobic backlash in Europe, it is time for a new vision for refuge. Going beyond the scenes of desperation which have become all too familiar in the past few years, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier show that this crisis offers an opportunity for reform if international policy-makers focus on delivering humane, effective and sustainable outcomes - both for Europe and for countries that border conflict zones. Refugees need more than simply food, tents and blankets, and research demonstrates that they can offer tangible economic benefits to their adopted countries if given the right to work and education. An urgent and necessary work, Refuge sets out an alternative vision that can empower refugees to help themselves, contribute to their host societies, and even rebuild their countries of origin.

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives


J. Jack Halberstam - 2005
    Jack Halberstam examines the significance of the transgender body in a provocative collection of essays on queer time and space. He presents a series of case studies focused on the meanings of masculinity in its dominant and alternative forms especially female and trans-masculinities as they exist within subcultures, and are appropriated within mainstream culture.In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don t Cry, Halberstam turns his attention to the cultural and artistic production of queers themselves. He examines the transgender gaze, as rendered in small art-house films like By Hook or By Crook, as well as figurations of ambiguous embodiment in the art of Del LaGrace Volcano, Jenny Saville, Eva Hesse, Shirin Neshat, and others. He then exposes the influence of lesbian drag king cultures upon hetero-male comic films, such as Austin Powers and The Full Monty, and, finally, points to dyke subcultures as one site for the development of queer counterpublics and queer temporalities.Considering the sudden visibility of the transgender body in the early twenty-first century against the backdrop of changing conceptions of space and time, In a Queer Time and Place is the first full-length study of transgender representations in art, fiction, film, video, and music. This pioneering book offers both a jumping off point for future analysis of transgenderism and an important new way to understand cultural constructions of time and place."

Two Lives of Charlemagne


Einhard
    The biographies brought together here provide a rich and varied portrait of the king from two perspectives: that of Einhard, a close friend and adviser, and of Notker, a monastic scholar and musician writing fifty years after Charlemagne's death.

Whereas


Layli Long Soldier - 2017
    What did I know of our language but pieces? Would I teach her to be pieces? Until a friend comforted, Don’t worry, you and your daughter will learn together. Today she stood sunlight on her shoulders lean and straight to share a song in Diné, her father’s language. To sing she motions simultaneously with her hands; I watch her be in multiple musics.—from “WHEREAS Statements”WHEREAS confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicity back on its perpetrators. Through a virtuosic array of short lyrics, prose poems, longer narrative sequences, resolutions, and disclaimers, Layli Long Soldier has created a brilliantly innovative text to examine histories, landscapes, her own writing, and her predicament inside national affiliations. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” This strident, plaintive book introduces a major new voice in contemporary literature.

Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Health and Our Food


Geoff Bond - 2007
    But what if our foods were doing more harm than good, and fad diets made matters worse? Deadly Harvest examines how the foods we eat today have little in common with those of our ancestors, and why this fact is important to our health. It also offers a proven program to enhance health and improve longevity.Using the latest scientific research and studies of primitive lifestyles, the author first explains the diet that our ancestors followed—one in harmony with the human species. He then describes how our present diets affect our health, leading to disorders such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and more. Most important, he details measures we can take to improve our diet, our health, and our quality of life.

Civil Disobedience


Henry David Thoreau - 1849
    In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848).

The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia


James C. Scott - 2009
    This book, essentially an “anarchist history,” is the first-ever examination of the huge literature on state-making whose author evaluates why people would deliberately and reactively remain stateless. Among the strategies employed by the people of Zomia to remain stateless are physical dispersion in rugged terrain; agricultural practices that enhance mobility; pliable ethnic identities; devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders; and maintenance of a largely oral culture that allows them to reinvent their histories and genealogies as they move between and around states.In accessible language, James Scott, recognized worldwide as an eminent authority in Southeast Asian, peasant, and agrarian studies, tells the story of the peoples of Zomia and their unlikely odyssey in search of self-determination. He redefines our views on Asian politics, history, demographics, and even our fundamental ideas about what constitutes civilization, and challenges us with a radically different approach to history that presents events from the perspective of stateless peoples and redefines state-making as a form of “internal colonialism.” This new perspective requires a radical reevaluation of the civilizational narratives of the lowland states. Scott’s work on Zomia represents a new way to think of area studies that will be applicable to other runaway, fugitive, and marooned communities, be they Gypsies, Cossacks, tribes fleeing slave raiders, Marsh Arabs, or San-Bushmen.

Utopia


Thomas More
    The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society as described by the character Raphael Hythloday who lived there some years, who describes and its religious, social and political customs.